


Waiting for the Enthroned

by Triskaideka



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Decay, Gen, Introspection, Ruins, Sentient architecture, fics for stream team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 05:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15135797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triskaideka/pseuds/Triskaideka
Summary: There was nowhere to go when the Pevensies disappeared, and so Cair Paravel weathered the centuries without a voice. Alone. But, like the Talking Beasts, it remembered the golden age and longed for the return of its kings and queens.





	Waiting for the Enthroned

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wordsbetweenthelines](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordsbetweenthelines/gifts), [jsaer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jsaer/gifts), [KatHawkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatHawkins/gifts).



> With special thanks to Moose for acting as a sounding board.
> 
> _I hear my voice, and it's been here_  
>  _Silent all these years_  
>  —Tori Amos

Cair Paravel waits for its sons of Adam and daughters of Eve to return.

For one thousand two hundred eighty-four years it waits.

It waits, without sense of time, and it remembers, without a mental apparatus to store memories.

When the Long Winter began and the first bits of prophecy were spoken in hushed, hopeful whispers among the Talking Beasts and the Naiads and Dryads, Cair Paravel itself has heard the words through the Centaurs and something akin to hope had settled into its mortared stone foundation.

The White Witch herself had walked its grounds, just once, her hatred as indelibly present in her aura that an amalgamation of lovingly cut stone and deeper magic could sense it. After, the trees and the aquatic and arboreal nymphs had gossiped in frightened whispers that they feared she would raze the castle to rubble and thank Aslan that he must have protected someplace so central to the country’s redemption from her evil.

It has learned about living things and emotions and humans by the time the kings and queens are crowned and enthroned. It likes them and it likes the gardeners planting against future want. It has a _purpose_ and day by day the Talking Beast helpmeets assist in fulfilling that purpose: to stand and to abide that those prophesied might help Narnia flourish.

The castle cannot communicate with those around it but it becomes a very good listener during those short years of habitation and happiness.

Then the unthinkable happens and the kings and queens, the prophesied saviors of Narnia itself, disappear. Rumors abound: kidnapping, murder, kidnapping _and_ murder, childish abandonment to escape the duties they swore to uphold. Oh, the debates it overhears are hot and furious; acrimonious to a fault. As the days slowly pass and a regent is first elected and the servants continue to keep the castle and country running, it seems like awakening from a nightmare into a lightless night. Those who tend the gardens fall away with time; those who sweep floors and tend hearths must find other work to survive; those who stand guard behind the crenelations are called away to wage war or defend homesteads; and finally all that is left is the castle itself, waiting.

It waits while vines and creepers climb its outer walls and slither into rooms that were previously the domain of humans and Talking Beasts, Dwarvish ambassadors and Centaur seers. It waits while untended orchards spread and encroach on defensive walls, each year's hardy apples dropping closer and closer to those stone ramparts. Birds leave seed-rich droppings on flagstone and courtyards but they find little purchase for their roots. Not so with the desperate roots that come tunneling under towers and curtain walls, destabilizing what stands above so that in places it falls in. The roof over the banquet hall goes in a late autumn storm borne on the sea. Fewer mice nibble at the broken chunks of wood scattered around, though spiders still spin hopeful webs in dark corners to await the humid summer’s hatching of insects.

Still, Cair Paravel does not lose what a Talking Beast might call hope—it doesn't feel emotions the way living creatures do but it has some vague understanding of those sorts of things. It loses count of the seasons as they go by, for counting seasons is not something that a castle would necessarily feel a need to track. It doesn't yet think that those who belong inside its walls won't be coming back.

One fall, late in the season, when the storms are at their worst, a small boat beaches on the shore just south of the isthmus. Its contents spill out in driving rain, desperate for shelter. The castle is prepared to offer them what aid it can if they are unobtrusive out of respect for its masters' notions of hospitality, but no. They come in like a raiding party and, after a fruitless attempt to smash through the sealed front gates still resolutely holding on with fading magics that invoke Aslan’s name, they circle the outer wall until they come to where it has fallen in and then they run wild through the corridors, whooping and brandishing torches against the dripping darkness that lurks there. This will not stand.

Cair Paravel exerts its will, and like long-disused muscles coming to life, the cobblestones trip them; the wind whistles through uninhabited passages like the mournful voice of the dead; the trees creak alarmingly loud and branches break off with sudden snaps. It is not enough, it thinks, observing the intruders without eyes or ears but still sensing their footfalls and their breath and their ill-mannered carousing.

Much as it hates to resort to stronger measures, it sees no alternative. At first the pirates chalk up the mishaps to luck or ill-conceived pranks on their compatriots' parts, but within a few hours of the first set of bricks falling next to a man in an otherwise unoccupied room, they band together once more and mutter uneasily. The first man to mention ghosts is raucously taunted for it, but it is done to cover the nervous laughter of those whose doubts haven’t yet begun to overshadow their poor sense. Several men are unlucky enough either not to hear the masonry scraping in its seat just before it falls or the castle catches them while they're asleep and lames them without a hint of satisfaction in the outcome, for it is only defending itself.

The pirates depart in a mad scramble, some making for the boats despite the ongoing storm adding fury to the waves, others fleeing on foot into the woods beyond the stone walls. A fearsome legend is planted in their minds. Unbeknownst to Cair Paravel, after word spreads that its grounds are haunted with the angry ghosts of…something; what precisely changes with each telling whether it's Talking Beasts, Naiads and Dryads, or the long-disappeared monarchs' vengeful spirits, each of which would have sufficient reason to react with territorial possessiveness to an incursion—few can find legitimate reasons to intrude after that which aren't propped up by bravado and the grounds decay further as the seasons continue to turn, for time itself might run backwards periodically in Narnia but its consequences are not halted on its loyal subjects. Contravening the Deep Magic would take a power far beyond that which gave rise to a castle’s limited silent consciousness.

Those who come to dig up the land bridge between the castle grounds and the mainland are superstitious enough not to get too close, for fear of feeling the ghosts' wrath. The faraway Telmarine conquerors can scream themselves hoarse, but the ghost stories have become too entrenched for locals and those itinerant workers who have definitely heard them while lounging drunkenly at a camp’s fire to risk their lives. Now squirrels no longer leap across the gaps between trees and cache their bonanzas in the former apple orchard, and while birds may nest in the rafters where the ceilings have yet to fall in, the unheeding waves crashing on the shore overshadow the sound of birdsong.

This is when Cair Paravel begins to doubt, wondering if it and the nation are forsaken for Aslan knows what distractions. What was called a Golden Age in history books has faded from the minds of men, and Cair Paravel cannot stand unaided against the march of time.

It grows quiescent, almost dreaming of its glory days.

And then—oh, and then comes the day when familiar footsteps cross the ancient upturned paving stones and the castle knows that the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve have returned. They tread its shattered, uneven floors and uncarpeted hallways as none other, these children who hold their shoulders like experienced negotiators and courtiers and who could have, under happier circumstances, performed the sort of dance that was fashionable among all of civilized Narnia in its day. These children who step as heavily as if they bear the burdens of adulthood far too early, as the palace servants once whispered when first they sat in throne and were yet unproven.

For although it cannot speak to them and tell them how glad it is that they have returned, it can uncover a long-abandoned chess piece where their campfire might reveal its winking gemstone eye.

It cannot express to them its relief that they are here and things will be put to rights once more; the trust in their capabilities no matter that their physical forms have returned as the slight, childish ones in which Cair Paravel first came to know them. Clearly they remember their time as monarchs, even if their muscle memory does not: their discussions and eventual realization that they once again walk the grounds they once ruled so well serve as proof for their one time ruling seat’s peace of mind.

The castle does everything in its meager powers to aid them, even beyond whispering without a voice that it knows them and they it. When they break into the armory, it does what it can to render the rotted boards more inflexible, like a Giant waking from an enchanted sleep to break through bonds placed upon its body, so the monarchs expend less effort getting to their weapons.

Perhaps it senses that they will need all their energy to survive the coming journey through a land whose upheaval none of them could have dreamed.

And when they have left its grounds again, in the company of a Dwarf whom they rescued from murdersome Telmarines, a less innocent, less blindly trusting Cair Paravel wonders if they will prevail once more.

*

When Caspian X, newly crowned king, victor over the conquering Telmarine armies against the Talking Beasts, sees the state of Cair Paravel, he weeps openly. There were the stories from his nurse about the Old Days, of course, so he should have known—but seeing it, coming to terms with it unquestionably in front of his eyes like this overwhelms him. His ancestors were directly responsible for the destruction that had led to Cair Paravel's descent into disuse and ruin, he tells the stones that still stand, and he promises them that he will rebuild.

The three years that Caspian X spends exploring the islands that are also part of his domain, what is left of Cair Paravel holds itself ready for news of the worst to return. Trust does not come easily to its spirit any longer, and the orders given before the king left to remove the rubble and begin reconstruction of the palace seemed in line with proper custodianship of so historic a monument, but it waits for the proverbial other shoe to drop. The original Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve are long gone, and with them the original builders' plans crumbled to dust, all tapestries and paintings depicting its spires and crenelations long since looted or burned. It won't be the same, Caspian X proclaims upon his return, but he will do all that is in his power to see a return of that lost Golden Age.

And although the king who gained the blessings of the original monarchs returns in one piece, he bears confirmation of terrible, shocking news: not only will the High King and High Queen never return to Narnia, but neither will the Valiant Queen nor the Just King. Cair Paravel overhears his words and the guttering flame of its accidentally kindled spirit begins to ebb.

A castle cannot sleep away the years, it can only wait…and the spirit that animates it fades much as the ability for speech faded from some few of the Talking Beasts over the years following the Golden Age. Even listening to discussions around it of what happens after mortal beings die cannot give it a true concept of an afterlife, but it hopes for a heaven regardless. The humans who rebuild on the same site for the last time, many centuries later, are unaware that it is not precisely the same as it was for their ancestors many generations removed.

Cair Paravel’s spirit has passed on from Narnia, never to return.

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the sort of fic I would ever have expected to write, but a combination of folks in my orbit wishing there were more fics tagged with “sentient architecture” where I could stumble over it followed by a photograph performing that magic dance of inspiration and here we are.
> 
> [The original inspirational image](https://www.flickr.com/photos/marielamuse/39464968635/).
> 
> [A secondary inspiration](https://www.flickr.com/photos/christophersoddsandsods/14883893814/).
> 
> (I blame _Prince Caspian_ for my feelings about forgotten, crumbling ruins in books. It was like a gut punch to come back and find out it had been over a millennium.)


End file.
